BOSTON — NBA commissioner Adam Silver along with Nate Silver of ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight held a one-on-one discussion Friday at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference where they chatted — among many topics — about why analytics is woven into the fabric of the NBA arguably more than other U.S. professional sports leagues right now.
Silver first credited Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey and Jessica Gelman, CEO of the Kraft Analytics Group, for bringing the “NBA family” together nearly a dozen years ago for the first Sloan Analytics gathering.
“They saw that there was an irregularity in the marketplace, and there wasn’t the appropriate amount of discussion,” explained Silver, who added that the conference’s two co-founders brought together the NBA community to “build around basketball analytics.